


Tenderest Slice, Still Pink

by kayliemalinza



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angelic Anatomy, Blood, Gen, Gore, Implied Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 06:06:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kayliemalinza/pseuds/kayliemalinza
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A different look at "The Song Remains the Same." Anna breaks out of Heaven and hunts down Sam, but she doesn't have to go in the past to do it.</p><p>Teaser: She stands too long in a motel parking lot and leaves a pool of iridescence that passersby mistake for engine oil (it makes grass sprout from the mud caked between the tires it engorges the worms that live beneath the asphalt it seeps into the groundwater, and the flowers by the highway grow as tall as men that year.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tenderest Slice, Still Pink

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sour_Idealist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/gifts).



> Written for the prompt: "The AU where Ruby detoxes Anna from Heaven's persuasion" This fic is more of the set-up for that AU, actually, and assumes that Ruby survived 4x22.

She gets out. She clashes her wings against her brothers and cradles the bruises as she plummets, tender smears of blue-white light between bone and skin. She lands on Earth and holds her wings close around her when she walks through doorways. The left one is fractured, a lightning strike of pain running jagged from the knot of her back to the high arch that would be a wrist, if her wing were a human arm. 

She stands too long in a motel parking lot and leaves a pool of iridescence that passersby mistake for engine oil (it makes grass sprout from the mud caked between the tires it engorges the worms that live beneath the asphalt it seeps into the groundwater, and the flowers by the highway grow as tall as men that year.)

Sam reeks. When she kills him, she hopes his dirty blood won't splatter. She hopes it won't slip into the angry splits in her skin and poison the trembling grace that she has left.

And if it does, well. Anna doesn't mind a little sacrifice. She'll die a thousand times over to save the world (she really thought that Dean would understand, she thought that Sam would understand, she thought that he would let her press her fingers to his forehead and make it easy because not every hero's death must be bloody.)

That's not how it goes, of course. Cas gets in a body slam that cracks her wing in two, and when he pulls away three long pinions are sticking out of the wound there, stained with her blood along the sharp edges and with his blood at the pinpoint quills. Dean shoots her, bullets in the heart and the belly and one through the palm of her hand. 

But Anna is a warrior of millennia, survivor of every battle she's ever been in. Sam bleeds.

"I didn't want it to be like this," she says, and stills his mind as quickly as she can. His head falls back, mouth open, eyes closed, the arterial spray arcing low like a garden hose turned off. A Reaper leans against the wall and waits.

They're half a continent away from Dean and Castiel. She lost feathers on that flight. Castiel's pinions yanked out of her flesh with a quick hurt and some of her own slid out, smooth and awful, from inflamed follicles. They will find her, though. She knows what Cas is like with his nose to the ground. 

Anna tests the breadth of Sam's body with her fingers; the ball joint here at the hip, the sinews of his thigh, the roots of ribs and floating anchors of his shoulder blades. She'll freeze his flesh on distant mountaintops. She'll sow the crumbs of his bones in the pockmarks of the moon and burn his hair to ashes in the magma underground. She'll put his organs in the places he likes best: smeared grease-thin on the gears and gyros of the Impala, buried in the library lawn where he had his first kiss, dried to jerky and laid to rest in graveyards in Lawrence, Palo Alto, in the scorch marks of roadside funeral pyres. 

"Make sure he gets upstairs okay," Anna says.

The Reaper nods and pulls a loose thread from his shirt cuff. He and Sam are old friends. 

Anna coughs, shallow and wet. There's a lake on the floor, a liquid spotlight swirled with dark. She can feel Sam's blood trickling through her veins and the clots sticking to fourth-dimensional walls. 

Was it only a decade ago when she—when Anna Milton, thin red-headed child, tensile and soft the way humans are—took a health class in school and grimaced at the thought of blood-borne diseases? Anna laughs. 

"If it makes you feel better," she says, "I'm not going to survive this, either." Her death will be feverish. She'll molt and thrash and moan in a pitch that breaks glass. She has to destroy his body quickly, before she loses the strength to fly over the Earth, before her broken wing rots, before her human body sloughs off like snakeskin.

Sam, stubborn and righteous, keeps breathing. His lungs crackle. The lake on the floor grows larger.

"Come on, Sam," she whispers, and presses her fingertips into his skin to coax his soul out. "I don't have a lot of time."

Something cracks behind her. Anna turns—too fast: her wings light up with pain and she nearly falls. What catches her is awful and rank, constricting, made of corded weeds and brambles: a witch's net. 

"Sorry, sister," Ruby says. "I'm getting really good at this last-minute rescue thing."


End file.
